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Taylor Swift is Vogue's new cover girl for the magazine's February 2012 issue. Inside, the lovely 22-year-old singer talks about school days, fame, ambition, future, her parents, and the joys of being on her own. Check out some highlights from Taylor's interview!

Taylor Swift looks
beautiful on the latest cover of Vogue February 2012. In the
interview with the magazine, the stunning 22-year-old singer talks
about school days, fame, ambition, future, and the joys of being on
her own. Taylor, who grew up on a Christmas-tree farm in rural
Pennsylvania, told Vogue that when she was in fourth grade her
family moved to Wyomis­sing, an affluent suburb of Reading.
"So . . . middle school? Awkward. Having a hobby that’s different
from everyone else’s? Awkward. Singing the national anthem on
weekends instead of going to sleepovers? More awkward. Braces?
Awkward. Gain a lot of weight before you hit the growth spurt?
Awkward. Frizzy hair, don’t embrace the curls yet? Awkward. Try to
straighten it? Awkward! So many phases," the singer says.

Even though it is rather hard to believe, Swift always felt like an
outsider. "I think who you are in school really sticks with you. I
don’t ever feel like the cool kid at the party, ever. It’s like,
Smile and be nice to everybody, because you were not invited to be
here," Taylor admits.
She then adds that, "All of my favorite people — people I really
trust — none of them were cool in their younger years. Because if
you know how to be cool in middle school, maybe you have skills you
shouldn’t. Maybe you know how to be conniving, like, naturally.
There’s always that seventh-grade girl who looks like she’s 25. And
you’re like, How do you do it? How do you do it, Sarah
Jaxheimer?"

Still, Swift stopped caring about being cool. When did that
happen? "I think that happened as soon as I left school, when I was
sixteen, because then all that mattered was music and this dream
that I’d had my whole life. It never mattered to me that people in
school didn’t think that country music was cool, and they made fun
of me for it — though it did matter to me that I was not wearing
the clothes that everybody was wearing at that moment. But at some
point, I was just like, I like wearing sundresses and cowboy
boots," the young star recalls.

Today, Taylor is able to fill a stadium of 50,000 people. "I look
out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the
words to songs I wrote. And curling their hair! I remember
straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else,
and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just
funny. And wonderful," Taylor says.
Asked if she has ever freaked out, the singer admitted that, "This
is what I’ve wanted to do my whole life. It never freaks me out.
Never. Ever. But you know what does freak me out? When is the other
shoe going to drop? I am so happy right now. So I am always living
in fear. This can’t be real, right? This can’t really be my
life."

On her next album, Swift told Vogue that, "There’s just been this
earth-shattering, not recent, but absolute crash-and-burn
heartbreak, and that will turn out to be what the next album is
about. The only way that I can feel better about myself—pull myself
out of that awful pain of losing someone — is writing songs about
it to get some sort of clarity."

On a question she has heard so many times before, Taylor said
that, "Ever since I was sixteen, the question that I get in every
single interview is 'So, all the pop stars right now who are
stumbling out of clubs and going crazy — are you going to do that?'
When I was younger, I had to be more insistent with people because
they would say, 'Yeah, they all say that when they’re sixteen,
honey. Just wait till you’re nineteen or 20. That’s when it all
goes off the tracks!'".

She continues saying that, "But you know, as time has gone by, I’ve
gotten that question less and less. I think, for me, the bigger
pitfall is losing your self-awareness. Even though I am at a place
where my dresses are really pretty and the red carpets have a lot
of bright lights and I get to play to thousands of people . . . you
have to take that with a grain of salt. The stakes are really high
if you mess up, if you slack off and don’t make a good record, if
you make mistakes based on the idea that you are larger than life
and you can just coast."

Speaking about what she frets about, Swift confesses that, "I fret
about the future. What my next move should be. What the move after
that should be. How I am going to sustain this. How do I evolve. I
get so ahead of myself. I’m like, 'What am I going to be doing at
30?' But there’s no way to know that! So it’s this endless
mind-boggling equation that you’ll never figure out. I overanalyze
myself into being a big bag of worries."

Read Taylor's full interview in the February 2012 issue of VOGUE
magazine.